


Years

by solrosan



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Growing Old, Growing Old Together, M/M, Married Life, Old Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-22 06:13:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16592378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solrosan/pseuds/solrosan
Summary: Their friends looked, because Harry might be a young fifty-four, but he was fifty-four and Eggsy twenty-five and that could only lead to heartbreak...





	Years

Eggsy’s friends gave Harry some strange looks at first. Not because of the suit or his habit of always carrying an umbrella – they had grown used to that sort of odd behaviour after Eggsy started working at the tailors – but because he was _old._ He was almost thirty years older than Eggsy.

Thirty years. Three decades. It was more than Eggsy’s entire life when they first met.

So yes, Eggsy’s friends gave them strange looks.

Harry’s friends gave them strange looks for the same reason. Or for the opposite one, really. Harry’s friends gave them strange looks because Eggsy was _young_. Harry could easily be his dad. Some of Harry’s friends even _had_ kids that age. Most of Harry’s friends knew exactly what a capable agent Eggsy was though, and it made things smoother. 

Still, they gave them strange looks in the beginning and there were a few snide comments that came Harry’s way.

It wasn’t as if they were oblivious to the age difference. Harry knew exactly how much older he was and Eggsy thought he knew as well, but when you’re in your twenties age is a concept, not a reality.

Harry might have been a young fifty-four when they met, but he was fifty-four and Eggsy twenty-five.

Their friends stopped looking eventually. They grew accustomed to it. They didn’t see a pervert or a gold digger. They saw two people who were in love. Two people who were good for each other. Two people who seemed to complete each other. 

And it was true. They were in love, they were good for each other, they did complete each other.   
They laughed more. They lived more. They were more. Harry remained young thanks to Eggsy and Eggsy grew older faster than he probably would have without Harry. 

They widened each other’s worlds. They went to concerts, football games, and museums. They pretended to take cooking classes and be interested in art. They failed miserably at pub quizzes. They argued about having breakfast in bed and compromised about Christmas cards. They were always sure that it was the other person’s turn to walk the dogs.

Harry proposed on Eggsy’s thirtieth birthday. They got married on Harry’s sixtieth. 

Eggsy and Merlin planned it as a surprise. Merlin “sent Eggsy on a mission” that would force him to be away on Harry’s birthday. Harry understood, he was still an active agent, but he did give Merlin a few dark looks the days just after Eggsy left. Merlin found it rather funny, but Eggsy ached when Merlin told him about it. He and Harry had planned Harry’s birthday for three months, after all.

On the big day, Merlin convinced Harry to come out to the Kingsman Manor even though he was off duty. When Harry arrived, not quite as grumpy as he pretended to be, Eggsy was waiting for him on the steps, all dressed up in white tie.

“What do you say, wanna spend the rest of your life with me or what?” Eggsy asked, grinning from ear to ear. 

It was by far Harry’s best birthday ever. The fact that their friends had helped plan it made it even better. (It didn’t stop Harry from having a stern talk with Merlin for tricking him at around 1 am.)

They had good years together. They went on trips and saw the world as tourists and not as agents. They adopted two more dogs. They watched Daisy play football on Saturdays.

Harry kept old age at bay. It was easy as long as he was active in Kingsman, but he had died on the job once and thought that was quite enough, so when he was sixty-five he retired. 

They fell asleep on the sofa and woke up with aching necks and backs. They disagreed about paint samples for the kitchen. They had terrible inside jokes. They danced at Michelle’s wedding.

Eggsy turned forty. Then Harry turned seventy. 

Old age crept up on Harry. Thinning hair. Wrinkles. High blood pressure. Osteoarthritis. Cataract. It frustrated him to no end. He had never planned on getting old, he wasn’t peppered. He had always imagined himself meeting his end in the field. 

Eggsy on the other hand was in the shape of his life. The younger agents had nothing on him. Harry laughed at him whenever he muttered about useless, young hotheads and said something about pots and kettles. 

People started to look again. 

Eggsy couldn’t ignore what they saw out of youthful ignorance anymore, but ignored it he did. Stubbornly. 

The more pain Harry was in, the more frustrated he became with his body that didn’t obey him anymore, the more frequently he asked Eggsy why he had married such an old man.

“Because you proposed,” Eggsy answered every time.

Harry smile ruefully. “Sorry about that.”

Eggsy kissed him and told him to shut up. There was nothing to be sorry about, because if Harry hadn’t proposed, Eggsy would have. Perhaps not then, but he would have. That much he knew. Harry knew it too, because their wedding had almost been a second proposal, but he kept wondering if any of it had been fair to Eggsy.

Harry had his first stroke when he was seventy-three. Eggsy retired the same day Harry got home from hospital. He left Kingsman at the age of forty-four -- ten years younger than Harry had been when they first met -- to care for his husband.

Harry had his second -- and last -- stroke when he was seventy-five. He had come back pretty well after the first one, regaining his ability to speak very quickly and getting almost full movement back. The second one he didn’t wake up from at all.

Eggsy sat by his bedside every moment they let him. He held Harry’s hand, listening to the heart monitor and the machine breathing for him. He didn’t listen to the doctors telling him that it was time to let go. Or he pretended not to because he didn’t want to hear it.

This was what they had seen, the people looking at them. (At least in the later years.) This was the tragedy they had written for Eggsy years before it happened. This was the scene that had plagued Harry’s conscious since the first time he had taken Eggsy to bed.

The devastated middle-aged man at the old man’s deathbed.

Eggsy didn’t see that, not even with tears slowly making their way down his face as he tried to find the courage to let Harry move on, because he had never counted on them growing old together. Harry had almost made him a widower just four months after the wedding when he had been caught in an explosion. Eggsy had repaid that three times over the years. Not to mention that a knife in Eggsy’s gut had been two millimetres from ending it just weeks after it had started, or that Valentine _had_ ended it before it did…

So no, Eggsy didn’t see the tragedy the others saw. Old age was not a given, it was a luxury neither of them had counted on. They had got more than twenty years together and it was a miracle. 

Two decades. Almost half of Eggsy’s life.

They had had years together. 

That wasn’t, and could never be, a tragedy.


End file.
